You Might Just Cross Paths with the Type Rider

To celebrate her 40th birthday, Ms. Stein, a poet and sometime caterer, merged her love of cycling with a cross-country writing project. She plans to ride 40 miles a day, typewriter in tow, for 40 days until she reaches Milwaukee, where the design for the first mass-produced typewriter was developed in the 1860s. Along the way, she is delivering the manual typewriter to public spaces and inviting people to take a turn at the keys.

“It’s an unfolding adventure,” she said.

To help with expenses, including renting the recreational vehicle that she and a friend, Grace Moore, are camping in along the way, Ms. Stein raised $16,000 on Kickstarter, a Web site on which people solicit money for various projects. She described how her father kept a typewriter in the hallway between bedrooms for the family to use, an exercise in creativity that changed her life.

“I want to bring that communal hallway back,” she wrote on her Kickstarter page, adding, “I want to make a space for collaboration and creativity, to invite people to contribute their voices to the larger story of the community we’re all in.”

Since leaving her home in Amherst, Mass., on May 5 with the Remington typewriter she had purchased for the trip, Ms. Stein has set up in a half-dozen venues, including the Cherry Brook Garden Club plant sale in Canton, Conn., and the Freight House Café in Mahopac, N.Y.